Probably no American artist has had a decade as wildly prolific and tumultuous
as Alfred Leslie’s in the years 1956 to 1966. At the outset of this
brief
amazing run, in the latter fifties, Leslie carried Abstract Expressionism
to
new heights of graphic vehemence. At the same time, at the behest of what
he later called his “octopussarian impulses,” Leslie began
exploring other
creative possibilities: writing, photography and, above all, experimental
film. The “Beatnik classic” Pull My Daisy was screened in 1959,
followed
by The Last Clean Shirt (1964) and Alfred Leslie’s Birth of a Nation
(1966).
Then, to the consternation of his Ab-Ex partisans, Leslie’s paintings
began
to change. In the early sixties, visitors to his studio were confronted
by
giant grisaille portraits, often female nudes, standing in stiff, utterly
un-
Beatnik solemnity. Each of his three main bodies of work—the abstract
paintings, the films, the monumental figures—was singular and extreme.
And yet, in an art world notoriously hungry for signature style, Leslie’s
triple resumé made him less, not more visible. Audiences couldn’t
decide
which Leslie was Leslie. And the best opportunity to correct the situation
went up literally in smoke. Late in 1966, as he was preparing for a midcareer
retrospective at the Whitney, a disastrous fire destroyed the contents
of Leslie’s studio. A handful of lost paintings are visible in footage
shot by
visiting film crews. The canvases themselves—approximately fifty
of
them—not to mention drawings, notes, and hours of film, were destroyed.
The
Whitney show had to be cancelled. Years of work—including
nearly all his strange, Pop-like transitional paintings—was gone.
And that
wasn’t all. That same year, Leslie’s best friend, collaborator,
and critical
champion, the poet Frank O’Hara, died in a freak accident. In photographs
from the period, Leslie looks understandably stunned. In the years after
the
fire, Leslie has continued to make ambitious realist paintings, and flamboyantly
abrasive collage films, most of them marbled with violence, whimsy,
slapstick, and hardcore pornography. Recently, thanks to a couple of
Manhattan galleries, New York audiences have had a chance to look at two
key groups of Leslie’s older paintings. But his full output remains
surprisingly
little known. It includes, for example, a “one-shot” literary
omnibus,
The Hasty Papers (with contributions by Fidel Castro, Jean-Paul Sartre,
John Ashbery, Alice Neel, Alfred Jensen, and others), that is a forerunner
of
wilfully eclectic enterprises like the one you hold in your hands.
Leslie’s
admirers like to point out continuities in his work: collagebased methods,
an appetite for spectacular contrasts, an irrepressible performative energy,
a confrontational temper. At the same time, there is something simply confounding
about the range of Leslie’s achievements.His
octopussarianism remains mysterious. But the mystery, to my eye,
makes Leslie’s work more, not less compelling. Frank Stella’s
first stripe
paintings are hard to imagine without Leslie’s example. Ditto for
Chuck
Close’s early grisailles. Leslie’s films (and his early silkscreened
cans and
boxes) may have helped catalyze Andy Warhol’s imagination. Of course,
matters of inspiration are notoriously unpindownable. The point is not
to
prove that all roads lead back to Alfred Leslie. But there’s no doubt
that, as
the fifties turned into the sixties, Leslie was the most omnipresent, gregarious,
volatile intellect in New York. He probably still is. On the 40th
anniversary of the Whitney show that didn’t happen, I asked him to
look
back, and talk about those transitional years.

Alexi Worth: Your movie,
The Cedar Bar, is a kind of talking portrait of the
Abstract Expressionist circle, set in August 1956, in the week after Pollock’s
death. At that time, you were already an established abstract painter,
though not yet thirty years old. How did you see yourself in relation to
that group? Did it matter that you were a generation younger than most
of
them?

Alfred Leslie: The only one who seemed troubled by the age difference
was
Rothko. By and large there was a great breadth, a great sense of acceptance
at the Cedar. I remember walking in one time with David Smith, and a few
minutes later Bradley Walker Tomlin came in, and Edwin Dickinson, and
we all sat at the table together. And David said, “Look at the spread
of generations.”
That was beautiful.

AW: It was a pretty competitive, conflict-prone situation,
wasn’t
it?

AL: I never felt any competition with them. They were my friends, the
people
I saw every night. What passed for conflict was mostly just different
styles of delivery with a bunch of very serious drinkers. Of course, there
were some ideologues at the Cedar. But to me, that always felt antithetical.
My own view of Modernism was that it was an opening up, a looking at
other cultures, an inclusiveness, not a narrowing down. And think about
it:
Kaldis, Resnick, Rothko, Reinhardt, Cage, Steinberg, there’s lots
of different
points of view there.

AW: At that point, you were making very spare gestural
abstractions, paintings
like Six Panel White, and Big Green.

AL: They were the most minimalist of
my pictures. Six Panel White is what
it is: six panels, all off-white. That’s the whole painting, with
three or four
lines drawn across it. Everything brought down to brushstrokes. Those pictures
lacked the physical graces the later paintings had, but I loved them.

AW:
Why did the paintings gradually become more “graceful?”

AL:Well,
at first the paintings were all made with housepaint. Leonard
Bocour (the paint manufacturer) said, “Give me a collage and I’ll
give you
some oil paint.” I was penniless at the time, so the economics of
it were
unbeatable. I would give him a collage, just a little one, six by six inches,
and
then go to his factory and get thirty gallons of paint. Like that! I put
them
in a hand truck, and I trundled them back to my studio. Now that paint,
it
was real oil paint. It had an ambivalence, and a painterliness to it. The
pictures
started becoming more and more voluptuous. My paint surfaces used to
be like a Bronx kitchen cabinet. Now everything came out too fucking beautiful.
Too much pyrotechnics. It was getting worse and worse every day.

AW: Michael
Fried wrote a fascinating review of some of these paintings.
He thought you were deliberately overplaying the painterliness—that
you
were in effect saying, “I know the drips are sentimental, but I have
the
courage to be really sentimental, see?” Was that how you felt?

AL:
Yes. And don’t forget, this was the time when (Ab-Ex) painting
had
become totally acceptable. The sense of challenge was diminishing. For
me, it was the beginning of the transition. I said to myself, you can be
a painter
but a lousy artist. Or you can be an artist, but not be a painter. So I
said,
What am I?

AW: Were you already thinking about writing, about making films?

AL:
I made my first collage films in 1949. One of them, Directions: A Walk
After The War Games was screened at MoMA that year. But I decided that,
if I ever was going to mature as an artist, I had to focus on a single
discipline.
So I paused with that other stuff for a bit. I sold my camera, sold my
typewriter. I thought I needed to have a single public face. When I did
start
writing and taking photographs again, I kept it private. It became a kind
of
secret life.

AW: It seems very fifties: you were a closet multidisciplinarian.
What kinds
of things were you working on?

AL: I wrote what eventually became The Cedar
Bar and The Chekhov Cha-
Cha. I began the mugshots: Polaroid portraits of pretty much everyone who
came into my studio—there were hundreds of them. I was painting,
making
silkscreens. Everything was overlapping. And one day I just said to
myself, Go for it. Let the multiple disciplines decide who you are.

—

ALFRED LESLIE shows his paintings at Ameringer Yohe Gallery in New York
City. Among his many honors he is the recipient of a Gold Medal for Art
for his
life’s work as a painter from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
and a Lifetime Achievement Award for his films from the Chicago Underground
Film
Festival. His latest film-work is The Day Lady Died and 3
Other Poems by Frank
O’Hara (2007).

ALEXI WORTH is a New York painter who has written about
art for Artforum, The New Yorker, and other magazines.
He is represented by DC Moore Gallery.